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Current treatments for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections require intravenously delivered vancomycin; however, systemically delivered vancomycin has its problems. To determine the feasibility and safety of locally delivering vancomycin hydrochloride (~25 mg/Kg) to the medullary canal of long bones, we conducted a pharmacokinetics study using a rat tibia model. We found that administering the vancomycin intraosseously resulted in very low concentrations of vancomycin in the blood plasma and the muscle surrounding the tibia, reducing the risk for systemic toxicity, which is often seen with traditional intravenous administration of vancomycin. Additionally, we were able to inhibit the development of osteomyelitis in the tibia if the treatment was administered locally at the same time as a bacterial inoculum (i.e., Log10 7.82 CFU/mL or 6.62x107 CFU/mL), when compared to an untreated group. These findings suggest that local intramedullary vancomycin delivery can achieve sufficiently high local concentrations to prevent development of osteomyelitis while minimizing systemic toxicity.

Background: To assess the demographic and attitudinal factors associated with HPV vaccine initiation and completion among 18–26 year old women in Utah. Method: Between January 2013 and December 2013, we surveyed 325 women from the University of Utah Community Clinics about their HPV vaccine related beliefs and behaviors. Odds ratios (ORs) were estimated from logistic regression models to identify variables related to HPV vaccine initiation and series completion. Results: Of the 325 participants, 204 (62.8 %) had initiated the vaccine and 159 (48.9 %) had completed the 3-dose series. The variables associated with HPV vaccine initiation were lower age (OR = 1.18 per year); being unmarried (OR = 3.62); not practicing organized religion (OR = 2.40); knowing how HPV spreads (OR = 6.29); knowing the connection between HPV and cervical cancer (OR = 3.90); a belief in the importance of preventive vaccination (OR = 2.45 per scale unit); strength of doctor recommendation (OR = 1.86 per scale unit); and whether a doctor’s recommendation was influential (OR = 1.70 per scale unit). These variables were also significantly associated with HPV vaccine completion. Conclusion: The implications of these findings may help inform policies and interventions focused on increasing HPV vaccination rates among young women. For example, without this information, programs might focus on HPV awareness; however, the results of this study illustrate that awareness is already high (near saturation) in target populations and other factors, such as strong and consistent physician recommendations, are more pivotal in increasing likelihood of vaccination. Additionally, our findings indicate the need for discussions of risk assessment be tailored to the young adult population.

Weather-related research often requires synthesizing vast amounts of data that need archival solutions that are both economical and viable during and past the lifetime of the project. Public cloud computing services (e.g., from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google) or private clouds managed by research institutions are providing object data storage systems potentially appropriate for long-term archives of such large geophysical data sets. We illustrate the use of a private cloud object store developed by the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) at the University of Utah. Since early 2015, we have been archiving thousands of two-dimensional gridded fields (each one containing over 1.9 million values over the contiguous United States) from the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) data assimilation and forecast modeling system. The archive is being used for retrospective analyses of meteorological conditions during high-impact weather events, assessing the accuracy of the HRRR forecasts, and providing initial and boundary conditions for research simulations. The archive is accessible interactively and through automated download procedures for researchers at other institutions that can be tailored by the user to extract individual two-dimensional grids from within the highly compressed files. Characteristics of the CHPC object storage system are summarized relative to network file system storage or tape storage solutions. The CHPC storage system is proving to be a scalable, reliable, extensible, affordable, and usable archive solution for our research.

The Purkinje system (PS) and the His bundle have been recently implicated as an important driver of the rapid activation rate after 1-2 minutes of ventricular fibrillation (VF). It is unknown whether activations during VF propagate through the His-Purkinje system to other portions of the the working myocardium (WM). Little is known about restitution characteristic differences between the His bundle and working myocardium at short cycle lengths. In this study, rabbit hearts (n=9) were isolated, Langendorff- perfused, and electromechanically uncoupled with blebbistatin (10 μM). Pacing pulses were delivered directly to the His bundle. By using standard glass microelectrodes, action potentials duration (APD) from the His bundle and WM were obtained simultaneously over a wide range of stimulation cycle lengths (CL). The global F-test indicated that the two restitution curves of the His bundle and the WM are statistically significantly different (P<0.05). Also, the APD of the His bundle was significantly shorter than that of WM throughout the whole pacing course (P<0.001). The CL at which alternans developed in the His bundle vs. the WM were shorter for the His bundle (134.2±13.1ms vs. 148.3±13.3ms, P<0.01) and 2:1 block developed at a shorter CL in the His bundle than in WM (130.0±10.0 vs. 145.6±14.2ms, P<0.01). The His bundle APD was significantly shorter than that of WM under both slow and rapid pacing rates, which suggest that there may be an excitable gap during VF and that the His bundle may conduct wavefronts from one bundle branch to the other at short cycle lengths and during VF.

This dataset contains the electric field data sampled along ocean-continent boundaries during space weather hazards. A finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique is used to study potential space weather hazards to electric power grids located at the proximity of the coast. The most of the data are in floating point representation, and the data files are in .txt format. The data can be visualized using software such as MATLAB and Python. The data can be used to plot electric and magnetic fields along the ocean-continent boundaries for different scenarios (different depths of an ocean, different conductivities of a lithosphere and different frequencies of ionospheric disturbance).